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New Notebook, Old Wireless Troubles Brand new notebook PC, established wireless network waiting at home ... . Everything should just work, right? Our columnist gets a refresher course in troubleshooting. By Ron Pacchiano For the last few months my father's laptop has been giving him problems. Every time it did, guess who he called to come fix it? And it's never just to let me know that there is a problem. Oh no. Instead it's always an emergency and has to be addressed immediately. Well, the other night, I was trying to finish a review when he called me with yet another emergency. This was the last straw and I decided that I would go and buy him a new computer. So I took a trip to our local Costco and found him a nicely equipped HP Pavilion dv8000z notebook PC with a 1.86GHz AMD processor, half of Gig of memory, 80GB hard drive, 17-inch LCD display, dual-layer DVD recorder and integrated 802.11b/g wireless adapter. Not a bad system for less then a $1000. So with my father's new notebook in hand I headed to my parents house to set it up. Now, as is often the case, whenever I do something that is supposed to make my life easier, it usually ends up making my life more difficult. This situation was no exception. After completing the manufacturers' initial configuration, the next thing I needed to do was set up the wireless adapter to communicate with my parent's wireless network. Well, the wireless adapter saw the wireless LAN right away and I was even able to get it to authenticate to it with no drama. Within 3-5 minutes the notebook was online. I then proceeded to load the latest Windows Updates. This is when I started to notice a problem. For some reason, the wireless connection was dropping every few minutes. I couldn't understand what would be causing this problem. I had run across this type of a problem before, but it's been so long I couldn't recall exactly what I needed to do to resolve it. I tired a bunch of different things. I updated the wireless adapter drivers, the PC firmware, my routers firmware and so on. I even attempted to call HP's tech support to see if they were any issues like this with this model notebook. (I know, I write about this stuff, but I'm not too proud to call tech support on occasion). Anyway, nothing worked, and after about an hour of messing around with this, I finally had a revelation. It dawned on me that the last time I had ran across this issue it had something to do with the security settings. After a bit of exploring, I came across a setting I recognized that involved 802.1x authentication [define]. In the past, I've observed that the wireless signal will exhibit this behavior when the connection is configured to use 802.1x authentication, but your current hardware doesn't support it. If this was, in fact, the problem, then correcting it is pretty easy. In order to get the wireless adapter to stop dropping the connection all you need to do is disable the authentication process. To disable it just follow these steps:
As soon as I disabled 802.1x Authentication, the notebook became much more stable and stopped dropping its connection. This particular solution worked for me, but there are numerous other variables that could interfere with the performance and reliability of your wireless network. The key to maximizing the efficiency of your wireless network is to follow a few basic principles:
You could also compensate for a weak wireless signal by adding a repeater to your network. This would be positioned directly between your computer your wireless router. When a wireless signal is transmitted it is very strong. The longer it travels, the weaker it becomes. This continues until the signal has degraded beyond use. This is known has attenuation. The repeater works by picking up a weak wireless transmission and regenerates it. Once regenerated, the signal is rebroadcast; effectively doubling the range of your wireless network.
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